Elon Musk and the Trump administration’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has terminated nearly $1bn in US Department of Education contracts, in effect eliminating a research office that tracks US students’ progress.
After announcing $101m would be slashed from 29 DEI training grants on Monday, the Doge account on Twitter/X said that Musk’s team terminated 89 contracts worth a total of $881m on Tuesday.
The huge budget cuts have essentially wiped out the federal agency’s research and statistics office – one of the country’s largest funders of education research – the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). IES gathers and disseminates data and research on a variety of subjects, including but not limited to the state of US student achievement, school crime and safety, and high school science course completion; their research is used widely by educators, state and local departments of education, school districts, colleges and other researchers.
An NPR report noted that there is already a program that will be cut short because of the withdrawal of these contracts. The study, which has been reportedly rolled out in multiple states, gave US students “high quality, adaptive digital tools” to help them improve in math; now, that study will be cut short and those tools could be removed from classrooms imminently, according to a source with extensive knowledge of many of these canceled education department contracts, who would not speak publicly for fear of retribution.
The US senator Patty Murray, who sits on the Senate’s education committee and is a former preschool teacher, called Musk in a statement an “unelected billionaire” who is “bulldozing the research arm of the Department of Education – taking a wrecking ball to high-quality research and basic data we need to improve our public schools. Cutting off these investments after the contract has already been inked is the definition of wasteful.”
Murray continued: “Elon Musk doesn’t care if working class kids in America get a good education, so whittling down the Department of Education means nothing to him. Make no mistake, this is just the first step Donald Trump and Musk are taking to abolish the Department of Education, leaving our public schools with fewer resources and support to pay for massive tax cuts for billionaires and giant corporations.”
It does appear that some IES programs were spared, including the Obama-era college scorecard tool that helps students compare colleges, the National Assessment of Education Progress, and the “Nation’s Report Card”, a nationwide assessment that measures the academic performance of students across the country against national standards in various subjects such as math, reading, science and writing.
Felice Levine, the director of American Educational Research Association, which frequently collaborates with the education department, confirmed 169 IES contracts had been terminated.
“Limiting the important work that NCES does by terminating these contracts will have ramifications for the accuracy of national-level data on the condition and progress of education, from early childhood through postsecondary to adult workforce,” Levine said in a statement. “Without such research, student learning and development will be harmed.
The move to eliminate these contracts comes after the US House representative Maxwell Frost shared a video last week in which he and other lawmakers are physically locked out of the education department’s building. Musk responded to the video by saying: “What is this ‘Department of Education’ you keep talking about? I just checked and it doesn’t exist.”
Musk’s rhetoric and actions follow a long-held promise by Trump to dismantle the department, which would require an act of Congress. The president is reportedly finalizing an executive order to do just that, though it remains unclear what the exactly the order will do or if it can be legally enacted.